1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the synthesis of circuit designs and, more particularly, to the replacement of circuit components having a high level (abstract) representation with the a more fundamental binary bit level representation.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the usual circuit design synthesis procedures, simple instance replication is used to produce a number of copies of a abstract multibit instance (or data base object) in which the pins of each copy are assigned a bit position of a multibit vector. Similarly, a simple loop procedure can produce copies of a data base object to effectively instantiate or replicate a multibit entity at the bit level. Such loop procedures do not have the flexibility to synthesize any but standard circuit entities.
Referring next to FIG. 1, the procedure for synthesizing a logic circuit design according to the prior art is shown. Model definition data structures from a library of component definitions are entered into the data structures associated with the synthesis data base in step 11. In step 12, the information related to the instances of the circuit design including the connectivity information is entered in the data base. The instances of the circuit design are generally in a behavioral or functional form when entered in the synthesis data base. The synthesis procedure relates the instances of the circuit design to the model instances in step 13. In step 14, a set of rules for the synthesis procedure is applied to each of the model instances and the model instances are altered and connected in such a way as to maximize certain parameters such as size, path delay, power, etc. In step 15, the resulting circuit design is placed in a format that can control the automated fabrication of the circuit.